Graveyard of Empires

By Scott Mariani

Some wars are destined to be fought forever…

They call it ‘The Graveyard of Empires’ for good reason. For thousands of years, Afghanistan has been the rock that generations of would-be conquerors have perished on. What chance does one man stand in this place?

So when ex-SAS major Ben Hope hears former bounty-hunter, Madison Cahill, needs his help he knows it will test him to his limits – and beyond. As the borders slam shut, he must trace his friend before the new regime does. His only lead? An ancient lost city founded by Alexander the Great and rediscovered by Madison’s archaeologist father.

The mission will take Ben back to a place he thought was firmly in his past, back to someone he can never leave behind – and back to some old comrades. Among these is SAS man turned assassin, Jaden Wolf. Wolf has come to Afghanistan with his own agenda and knows as well as Ben that the conditions they face may prove as lethal as their enemies.

As they uncover old secrets, they find modern ones are just as dangerous. Who is the mysterious ‘Spartan’ that the British officials are so desperate to extract from behind enemy lines? And outnumbered and outgunned at every turn, is the pressure of being the last hope of the innocent too much to bear when surviving past sundown seems impossible?

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: Nov 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9780008505721

Scott Mariani

Scott Mariani is the author of the worldwide-acclaimed action / adventure series featuring maverick ex-SAS hero Ben Hope. Scott’s books have topped the bestseller charts in the UK and beyond. Scott was born in Scotland, studied in Oxford and now lives and writes in rural west Wales.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Afghanistan, February 1989

Rigby Cahill paused on the steep, rocky slope to catch his breath, condensation billowing in great clouds from his rasping lungs. The icy mountain wind burned his cheeks raw and his hands felt numb. Pushing sixty years of age, he wondered if maybe he was getting too old for this kind of stuff.

He and his team of Afghan diggers had climbed several hundred metres from the valley far below. The small convoy of vehicles that had brought them as far as they could up the mountainside looked like miniature models from up here. Abdul and the others halted for a moment while their boss stood panting and gasping a few moments longer. One or two of them exchanged private grins at the expense of the wealthy American guy who was paying them for this little expedition. Paying a lot of money, because this was by no means a safe place to be. The men were all carrying rifles as well as shovels and picks.

‘Give me a minute, guys,’ Rigby said. As he clapped his hands to get the circulation going again he gazed at the landscape around him, the same bleakly majestic scenery that had remained completely unchanged since Alexander the Great had marched his vast army though these same mountains, more than three hundred years before the birth of Christ. Even back in Alexander’s day this land had already been steeped in ancient history and soaked in the blood of countless dead. So many wars had been fought, so many had cruelly perished here. But Rigby understood the truth: that it was this barren, hostile, pitiless place itself that had been the ruination of every successive invading force, no matter how powerful, that had tried to make their conquest against it.

That was an intimidating thought for an outsider like Rigby Cahill, however well intentioned, who had made it his business to travel from a faraway land to disturb Afghanistan’s ancient secrets and wake up its ghosts. Hunting for lost antiquities was what he did for a living, whether it was relocating caches of stolen art from Nazi treasure trains, diving on sunken galleons off the coast of Sumatra or hacking through the South American jungle in search of Paititi, the fabled Incan City of Gold. He was no stranger to the sometimes hostile and dangerous corners of the world. And yet, this place haunted him. The looming white-capped mountains seemed to be watching, as though they knew something. The eerie moaning whistle of the wind made Rigby shiver with something more than cold.

He moved on, but only a few steps before he halted again, thinking he could make out a different sound half masked behind that of the wind. A distant crackling rumble. Like an earthquake, perhaps. Or a faraway clap of thunder? Craning his neck upwards he scanned the wintry pallor of the sky, a vast great dome above them, the cold sun directly overhead reflecting dazzlingly against the snowy peaks. He couldn’t see a single cloud. He glanced quizzically at Abdul, who shook his head with a knowing look and said, ‘Gunfire. The Mujahideen are not far away. We must be careful.’

They trekked onwards and upwards, dislodging rocks that tumbled down the slope. Now and then the crackle of distant gunfire still reached their ears, and the atmosphere was tense among the men. With the Soviets gone, the war was technically over; but the Afghan Mujahideen warriors were still everywhere, armed to the teeth and ready for action, while the political situation in general remained extremely unstable. Trouble was liable to erupt again at any time, and Rigby was painfully aware that time, itself, was a commodity he might not have much of.

It took them another half-hour or so of climbing before they finally reached the spot. Rigby checked his map once more and looked around him, orientating himself from his memory of last time he’d visited this place. That was ten years ago, back in 1979 just before the Russian tanks and troops had flooded into Afghanistan and made a mess of his plans, forcing him to abandon his search after such a tantalisingly promising start. All this time he’d been jumping with impatience to come back here and find out whether his instincts had been right, that the tentative discovery of the gold coins pointed to the existence of something far greater. If so, he could only hope and pray that nobody else had beaten him to it the intervening years.

This was it now. The moment of truth.

The men stood in a silent circle around him as Rigby crouched down and examined the ground. There were no particular landmarks anywhere, barely a wind-torn bush, nothing but rock; but he’d pictured this spot so many times in his mind during the past ten years that it was burned deep into his memory. Yes, here was the big stone under which he’d found the hollow containing the small but sensational cache of gold Alexandrine coins. His heart had been fluttering like a butterfly on that day ten years ago, just like it was doing now.

A decade of anxiety was at an end. In all these years, his discovery had remained safe. If he was right about what might lie buried here, then it was all his for the finding!

He nodded, barely able to contain his excitement. ‘This is the place,’ he said to Abdul, the only one of the digger team who spoke English. ‘Let’s get started.’

‘Right here?’ Abdul said, pointing straight down at his feet.

Rigby hesitated, casting his expert eye over the ground as though it were an X-ray machine that could discern the shapes of ancient city walls buried deep under all those tons of rock and dirt. Trusting his intuition he motioned to a slight mound a few yards away. ‘Let’s try over there instead.’ He directed them to spread out a little and dig in different parts of it, to scatter their risk of missing the right spot.

The men propped their rifles against boulders, unslung their packs, grabbed their shovels and picks and set to work. Rigby stood back and watched, but his impatience soon got the better of him and he grabbed a pick for himself and joined them. He was physically quite out of shape, as the climb had proved, but now his enthusiasm was unstoppable as he hacked and chipped breathlessly away. Gradually, they hollowed out the top of the mound and spread their efforts over the surrounding area. It was tough work and sweat stung Rigby’s eyes despite the cold. The distant gunfire seemed to have died away, though he was barely even aware of it.

Just when Rigby was beginning to doubt his judgement as to where they should be digging, his pick blade hit something hard that gave a dull clang unlike the sound of a normal rock. He kept working at it, pouring sweat and puffing like an asthmatic rhinoceros, and within a few more minutes he’d uncovered what appeared to be the corner of a stone block. He got down on his knees and carefully brushed away the loose dirt. The block’s straight edges were chipped and crumbled with age but beyond any doubt a manmade object. There was another one right beside it, some bits of the ancient mortar still visible.

He called to the workers and showed them what he’d discovered, and they all started digging energetically to uncover more of it. ‘Careful, careful,’ he kept urging them, even though none except Abdul could understand a word he said. ‘These stone blocks are over two thousand years old!’

The hours dragged wearily by. Shovel load by shovel load, boulder by boulder, they stripped away the rubble of two millennia and the first tantalising outline of the ancient walls revealed itself. The temperature had dropped a couple more degrees as evening approached, and Rigby’s teeth were chattering. The threatening gunfire in the distance was long gone by now, but that didn’t mean that the Mujahideen warriors wouldn’t be back. Many different units belonging to different factions patrolled these hills regularly, on foot, in jeeps or on horseback, bristling with weapons. These were lean, tough, battle-hardened, implacable men who’d known nothing but fighting and hardship all their lives. After years of bitter guerrilla war, with backing from their secret allies the CIA, they’d managed to defeat the might of the USSR. What enemy would they set their sights on next?

The light was beginning to fail by the time Rigby’s men had unearthed the rectangular shape of a large stone slab, broad and long enough to be the floor base of a significant building. There was no longer much doubt in Rigby’s mind of what they were looking at, but he still needed the final proof.

It wouldn’t be long before he had it.

Through a five-inch-wide crack in the floor slab, Rigby shone a torch to see that beneath it was a hollow chamber of indeterminate size, partially collapsed. As he angled the light this way and that his heart leapt at the unmistakable glimmer of gold from within. Abdul was poised at his shoulder, peering intently through the crack and seeing what he saw. The Afghan’s normally laconic expression filled with excitement.

Now, their tiredness completely forgotten, they set about widening the crack to get at what was inside. ‘Gently, gently!’ Rigby said over and over. ‘Don’t do any more damage than you have to!’ Using crowbars they carefully worked at the gap until it was possible for the most slightly built of them, a fourteen-year-old boy called Safi, to slip through and drop down into the hollow space below. Rigby was worried that the chamber might collapse and bury the boy alive.

The casket was much too heavy for young Safi to bring up, so they had to lower a rope with a sling attached and haul it up through the gap, swaying and swinging precariously as it inched upwards. Rigby was hoarse from repeatedly urging caution. At last, the casket was through the gap, grabbed by eager hands that set the swinging golden oblong box carefully down on the ground. At the same moment there was a cry from inside the chamber, and for a heart-stopping instant Rigby thought something terrible must have happened to the boy. But no, Safi had found another casket!

The second casket was soon joined by a third, then a fourth, all laid out in a row. By the light of torches and lanterns Rigby knelt on the ground and used a brush to wipe away the filth of millennia to reveal the royal seal of Alexander the Great cast in gold on the side of the first casket.

This was it. The final, irrefutable proof he’d hoped to find. He bowed his head, almost weeping with emotion as thousands of years of history seemed to flash in front of him. He murmured, ‘My God. We found it. We found it.’

The men were hopping from foot to foot with excitement. Rigby took out a penknife and gently, oh so gently, prised open the seal of the first casket lid. As the lid came up, he breathed in the air that had been trapped inside for some 2,300 years.

But nothing could have totally prepared him for what the casket contained. He reached in a trembling hand and came out with a fistful of glinting gold. Coins, jewellery, figurines. Magnificent objects from the time of Alexander. More, far far more, than had ever been found in one place before now. It was unbelievable. Dizzying. He’d come here simply in the hope of uncovering the Alexandrian lost city of Zakara. This was a hundred times – no, a thousand times – beyond what he could have dreamed of. And for all they knew, there could be dozens more caskets buried inside the chamber.

By now Safi had come up from the hole and was standing behind Rigby’s shoulder, Abdul at the other, staring at the loot like hungry hawks. As they all watched, Rigby opened the second casket. It was even fuller than the first. Then the third.

Rigby had tears in his eyes. He couldn’t tear his gaze away.

Abdul’s initial excitement seemed to have died down, and he was looking thoughtful. He muttered, ‘Who does this belong to?’

‘It belongs to Afghanistan,’ Rigby told him. ‘To your country. It’ll be the finest exhibit in the state museum in Kabul.’

Abdul shook his head. He said softly, ‘No.’

Rigby wasn’t quite sure he’d heard right. ‘What do you mean, no?’

The clack of a rifle bolt in the darkness. Rigby’s blood froze. He turned slowly to see the muzzle of the weapon pointing in his face, held by Safi.

Abdul said, ‘No. It belongs to us.’

Chapter 1

Ben Hope often reflected on all the bad things he’d done in his life. The failures, the mistakes, the disappointments, the times when he hadn’t managed to achieve what he’d set out to do, or had fallen short of the rigorous standards he expected of himself. The people he’d hurt, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. Whatever his professional track record might indicate about his character and integrity, however many personal sacrifices he’d made in the pursuit of doing good, and in spite of his history of saving lives and bringing justice to the wrongdoers of this world, there were moments when all he could see about himself was fault and weakness, and his mind was preyed on by remorse and self-blame over the path he’d taken in his life.

And yet, for all that, in his more reflective moments even he had to admit that he must have done some good things too. Because every now and then, according to the laws of fate, or karma, or whatever obscure metaphysical forces were responsible for the allocation of recompenses and just deserts, as the case may be, an unexpected reward came to him that he couldn’t otherwise have deserved.

One such reward was close beside him at this moment, as the pair of them stood there alone on the empty, windswept beach, clasping hands, listening to the crash and boom of the waves breaking on the shore and watching the glimmering orange ball of the sun dip gradually over the sea.

Neither one of them spoke until the sun had finally vanished behind the horizon, the distant cloud banks like a mountain range glowing in a dramatic blaze of crimsons, golds and purples. Then the colour slowly faded, the spectacle died away and the chill of dusk began to set in.

She leaned her head against his shoulder and tenderly squeezed his hand. ‘Our last sunset,’ she said.

‘It didn’t have to be,’ he replied.

‘You know it did, Ben.’

Her name was Abbie Logan, and she’d been part of his life – pretty much his whole life in fact – for the last six weeks. They had met by chance in her native Australia, and then a romantic impulse (not something that often occurred in Ben’s daily existence) had prompted him to invite her to come back to France with him.

Half English, half Irish on his mother’s side, he had moved around a great deal in his past, both during and since his military days; but for some years now he’d been settled in a quiet corner of Normandy, a place called Le Val. Abbie had never been to Europe before, never known anywhere outside of the Northern Territory in which she’d been born and raised.

Their time together had been among the happiest that Ben could remember: showing her some of his favourite haunts, walking around the ancient woods and rolling green fields that surrounded Le Val, swimming in the sea, hiking in the hills, introducing Abbie to some of the local cuisine, and generally enjoying one another’s company to the utmost. They’d managed to compress six months’ worth of intense romance into as many weeks, and sometimes it had seemed to him that it could go on forever. But after a lot of heartfelt discussion, the two of them had come to the mutual acceptance that this couldn’t be the love of their lives. Abbie had her own life to return to, her own direction, her roots in her beloved Northern Territory and the responsibility of running the successful air charter business she’d inherited from her late father. As much as she’d treasured every moment of her time here with Ben and would never forget it, this just wasn’t her world. And so the time would soon be coming for them to part ways. One final night together, and she’d be leaving in the morning.

‘I’m going to miss you, Abbie Logan,’ he repeated for the hundredth time that day, wrapping his arm around her shoulders and drawing her in tight. She brushed a lock of blond hair away from her face and smiled up at him with a twinkle of those impossibly blue eyes.

‘I’m going to miss you too, Ben Hope,’ she replied. ‘Until the next time, eh? Australia’s not that far to travel, for a globe-trotting adventurer like you.’

‘You just try to keep me away,’ he replied.

But they both knew in their hearts that tomorrow morning would probably be the last time they would see each other. Ben ached at the thought of losing her. But what else could he do? Propose marriage? He could imagine her response: ‘Why spoil a good thing, Ben?’ And he’d have had to agree.

Abbie had travelled to France in unlikely style, on a private jet belonging to Ben’s sister’s business corporation, Steiner Industries. It wasn’t exactly a typical mode of transport for Ben either, and how that situation had come about was a long story. Whatever the case, despite being a keen pilot with a passion for aircraft and a particular admiration for Ruth’s sleek white Bombardier Global, Abbie had staunchly refused to be indulged in such privileged luxuries for the return trip. Early next morning he drove her the twenty kilometres from Le Val to the airport at Cherbourg, where her commercial flight was due to depart at ten. Neither of them wanted a big emotional farewell. By unspoken mutual consent no sloppy sentiments, and especially not the dreaded words ‘I love you’ or anything like them, were to be expressed. She gave him a tight hug, a last quick kiss, and then she was gone.

He stood outside the terminal and lit a Gauloise in the mid-morning sunshine as her plane took off. He watched it until it disappeared into the distance, then crushed out his cigarette, turned his back and walked slowly with a heavy heart to his BMW Alpina.

‘Well, that’s that,’ he said to his German shepherd, Storm, who was waiting for him in the back of the car. The seats were all nicely matted with black, tan and golden dog hair. He thumped his tail happily and made a little whimper.

‘You liked her, didn’t you?’ Ben asked him.

Thump, thump.

‘Yeah. Me too. Between you and me, buddy, I think I liked her a little too much. Anyway, let’s go home.’

The old stone house at Le Val stood on the site of an even older manor dating back to medieval times. During its history the place had been a farm, one of the many that dotted Ben’s peaceful rural area. But in its modern incarnation, since Ben and his old friend Jeff Dekker had bought the property as a base for their then newly founded business, the house stood hidden from the quiet country road at the end of a long track guarded by high gates and surrounded by an impenetrable wire mesh fence that enclosed the whole sizeable acreage like a military base.

The need for such an impressive level of security was down to the nature of the work that went on there. Le Val was designated as a tactical training facility, which meant that Ben, Jeff, their associate Tuesday Fletcher and the small, hand-picked team of employees were involved in teaching some highly specialised skills to delegations of military, police, security and VIP protection personnel who travelled from all over Europe and beyond to learn from the best teachers in the business.

What made the Le Val team so uniquely qualified to pass on such expertise was, in large part, the military background of its two principal founders. Ben had spent well over a decade serving in theatres of war all over the world with 22 SAS, the British army’s most elite special forces regiment, working his way up to a final rank of major before he’d quit to go freelance, locating and rescuing kidnap victims held for ransom. Jeff’s career had been on the naval side, an equally long stint with the Special Boat Service, the SAS’s waterborne counterpart. Between them, Ben and Jeff had a wealth of tactical experience second to none – not to mention the almost supernatural skills brought to the table by the redoubtable Tuesday Fletcher, ex-army sniper extraordinaire.

The training facilities at Le Val included two firing ranges, a so-called ‘killing house’ modelled on the one used to train SAS troopers in the finer points of close-quarter battle, an extensive cross-country area over which they practised evasion and survival techniques, a track and skid pan where defensive driving skills were sharpened up, and more besides. Almost from Day One, their teaching courses had been in such demand that there was a waiting list a mile long and the place was nearly always buzzing with activity.

All of which made the current quiet spell they were enjoying rather unusual. They didn’t exactly do holidays at Le Val, but since Ben and Jeff had returned from Australia, where they’d been attending to some urgent family business of Jeff’s, the two had each had their separate reasons for taking some time out of the normally hectic schedule. Ben’s reason was Abbie, with whom he’d been so preoccupied lately; while Jeff had needed the rest period to recuperate from a broken collar bone and a nasty injury to his hand, sustained during their eventful trip away. The hand had been attended to by doctors back in Australia but caused some concern to his surgeon here in France. After two delicate operations, it was on the mend but still not fully operational, though the prognosis was optimistic.

And then to cap it all, Jeff had now come down with some kind of summer flu bug that had reduced him to a sneezing, sniffling, watery-eyed, red-nosed miserable wreck for the last several days. Jeff being Jeff, though, he had fiercely refused to surrender to his condition and go to bed like a normal person, instead confining himself to the living-room sofa where he spent his days huddled under a blanket, slurping mugs of hot lemon juice with honey and whisky (Ben’s special recipe, made with an extra-generous slug of his favourite single malt scotch) and griping incessantly at the television.

Nobody would have denied that Jeff Dekker possessed a great many admirable qualities as a person, but he absolutely made for the world’s most cantankerous, irritable and difficult patient. Unable to stand it any longer, Tuesday had taken advantage of the quiet spell to fly off for a week to Jamaica, where he had about a thousand brothers, sisters, cousins and assorted other relatives.

So it was a much emptier house than usual to which Ben came home on his return from the airport – all the more depressingly so, now that Abbie was gone. Empty, but not silent. As Ben walked inside the front hallway with Storm trotting happily at his heels, he could hear the sound of the TV from down the long, narrow passage. It was a rare thing for anyone at Le Val to watch television, partly because Ben didn’t much care for idly goggling at a screen, and also because they were usually far too busy with more important matters.

He walked along the passage towards the living room. It sounded as though Jeff was watching the news, as he’d been doing virtually around the clock these last days. TV news was another thing Ben didn’t much care for, considering that much of what the mainstream media reported was a pile of barefaced lies and propaganda. Along with the sound of the commentator, Jeff’s voice could be heard raised in an indignant protest at whatever was being talked about.

Ben paused at the door, steeling himself for another round of his friend’s irascible moods, then opened it and went in.

Jeff was sitting there with his mug, his blanket, and an angry scowl that softened only slightly as Ben walked into the room.

‘What’s up?’ Ben asked.

Jeff jabbed an accusing finger at the screen. ‘Oh, you should see this, mate. Things are going from bad to worse out there. Those stupid bloody bastards couldn’t have made a bigger balls-up of it if they’d done it on purpose.’

Chapter 2

‘I don’t want to see it,’ Ben said, deliberately averting his eyes from the television. But even without taking in the images on the screen he knew exactly what Jeff was talking about. Ben hadn’t been so tied up with Abbie Logan these last few weeks as to be blind to what was going on in the rest of the world. Specifically, the political situation that had been rapidly, and disastrously, unfolding in a particular part of the world that Ben happened to know very well.

It was always the same tired old story. Every time a large-scale military operation stood down after months or even years of presence in a foreign country, even when the campaign had been more or less successful the withdrawal necessarily created scenes of absolute chaos, both among the bewildered civilians and even among the troops, who often had little clue what was going on. And in this particular case, the situation was far, far worse, because the campaign had been going on for a long, long time and been anything but successful.

After two decades of the most unproductive and costly war since its humiliating retreat from Vietnam some forty-five years earlier, the US army had finally withdrawn from Afghanistan. As many had predicted, it was an inglorious ending to a largely worthless campaign. Though US leaders had been mooting the pull-out for years and had had any amount of time to prepare adequately, in the event they’d managed to botch things so badly that a large number of fellow Americans and their allies, men, women and children, had been left stranded at the mercy of the country’s new rulers. And as everyone had known and feared would happen, those new rulers were the Taliban, a hardcore fundamentalist regime that had grown up out of the complex and conflicted military and political situation of recent decades. The whole damn picture was so muddied by covert CIA and other shadowy intelligence influences, secret allegiances and under-the-table political dealing that it had become an inextricable mess. Ben doubted that anyone would ever know the real, whole truth. And he certainly wasn’t interested in trying to figure it out.

Looking perplexed by Ben’s reaction, Jeff snatched up the TV remote and hit the mute button. ‘Why don’t you want to see it?’ he asked in the sudden silence of the room.

‘Because it’s none of my affair,’ Ben replied simply.

Jeff shook his head. ‘Bollocks. You were there in Afghanistan, back in the day. You knew the situation on the ground better than anyone.’

‘Did I? Did any of us really have a clue what we were doing there?’

‘Except we risked our bloody lives, and a lot of us lost theirs.’

‘True enough,’ Ben said. ‘Fighting a so-called war on terror that nobody could ever hope to win. And for what, Jeff? What did we achieve, except support the official narrative that was all based on lies and deception?’

‘I can’t believe you really mean that,’ Jeff protested. ‘You of all people.’

‘I do, and I’m sick of the whole thing. That’s why I’m not interested in sitting there all day staring at the television. It was never really our fight and in any case it’s all over now. End of story.’

‘Hold on a minute—’

‘I’m not getting drawn into this,’ Ben said. ‘Enjoy the show, but leave me out. I’m not bothered, okay?’

He and Jeff saw eye to eye on most subjects, and in all the years they’d known one another there had seldom been a disagreement. But before this discussion could turn argumentative, Ben withdrew from the room and closed the door behind him. Lingering there for just a moment before he walked away, he heard the TV volume come back on and Jeff resume his angry grumbling. Angry at Ben now, too, for his lack of interest.

Ben sighed, left his friend to it and headed back outside into the sunshine. It was a fine, warm day and he had relatively little to do. Storm had followed him from the house and was sitting there looking up at him expectantly with those golden-amber eyes full of intelligence and his jaws open in the nearest thing to a doggy smile. Ben knew what he was thinking.

‘You want to go for a walk? Come on, then.’

The farmhouse was the largest of the buildings – the office, the teaching classrooms, and the converted stable block in which Jeff had his quarters – that ringed the cobbled yard. From there it was just a five-minute stroll past the rear of the firing ranges and down a wildflower-edged track that led to the woods.

As he walked, Ben felt sorry that he’d spoken sharply to Jeff. It was true that he wanted nothing to do with all this talk of Afghanistan. He was thoroughly sick of that whole part of his past.

And yet, as much as he wanted to distance himself from the whole mess, he could understand why so many people, Jeff among them, were deeply concerned about these recent political upheavals. Even to the most limited understanding of the ordinary public watching the news broadcasts, it was clear that the US military withdrawal had been a complete and unmitigated disaster. From Ben’s experienced perspective as a former professional soldier it was even worse – and in fact he already knew much more about the depressing current situation in Afghanistan than he’d been willing to discuss with Jeff.

The occupying American troops had pulled out of the country so fast, ostensibly to reduce the risk of being attacked as they retreated, that they had left the Afghan security forces in chaos. With their American overseers suddenly no longer there to marshal them, corrupt officers had been reported to be stealing their men’s food and wages, even their ammunition. Police and military forces had crumbled in the face of the advancing Taliban, now emboldened by the American retreat and smelling victory.

Initially the embattled Afghan government, never much more than a puppet administration for the Americans, had declared it would stand and fight to prevent the Taliban from taking over the country. Ministers had delivered all the usual sabre-rattling speeches in which they promised to hold onto their proud homeland, just as they had kept it out of the hands of the Mujahideen for